In/transitive Modernities: Dis/continuities and Cultural Transformation

The virtual part will be running from January to April 2023. It will comprise ten 2 hour-long thematic sessions in which the teaching staff will introduce key concepts and questions related to case studies, followed by discussion. Throughout the online and on-site course, students will engage with the core readings on the learning hub. The hub will also be used to share reading experiences and responses, and creative work in progress. Time: 5:00 pm-7:00 pm CET - Thursday 24 January In the first session, participants will be introduced to the key concepts that will be examined in “in/transitive modernities” and the teaching staff will present the aims and objectives of the course; participating students will be invited to form groups on the basis of their interests and background. In the following sessions, the teaching staff will introduce key concepts and questions, case studies and proposed activities pitched to the assigned materials. All online sessions will comprise discussions. From the second session onwards, tasks and activities will be assigned. · Thursday 31 January The second session provides a cultural and critical framework to the discussion of home by resituating it in the long history of European culture. In particular, it discusses the notion of the “nowhere” as an expression of a new geographical sensitivity that claimed the possibility of inhabiting a non-territorial space and turning it into a site of nomadic circulations and experimentations. - Thursday 7 February The third session offers us an opportunity to reflect on the figures, discourses and cultural strategies of passions that can be articulated with the changing configurations of the concept of 'home'. The lecture focuses on nostalgia, a chameleon-like modern passion that traverses modernity and fuels its imagination in a not always dysphoric way. - Thursday 14 February The fourth session pursues the discussion by focusing on the trans-European trajectories, and the mobility of a number of Nordic artists in the interwar period. The notion of home will be discussed in relation to feminist and gender issues, and cultural exchanges and networks. · Thursday 21 February The fifth session discusses the notion of home and no home in the recently rediscovered work of the Jamaican-born poet and writer, Claude McKay, one the founders of the Harlem Renaissance in New York in the early 1920s and a major expatriate figure in Europe and North Africa. - Thursday 7 March The sixth session examines the representation of home as the refuge of transmodern and intercultural relations and reciprocities, beyond and past the ethnocentric and racializing agendas of the organic community of the nation. Theoretical readings from Spillers, Balibar, Spivak, Derrida, Mignolo, and Walsh will help us shape the notion of a “tidal inhabitancy” that is inextricably linked to homelessness, dispossession, and expropriation. - Thursday 14 March The seventh session focuses on Claire Denis’s film Beau travail (2000). Key themes include formal-filmic aspects such as the extent/limit of connections to modernism and the avant-garde, literal and metaphorical unrootedness/rootlessness, post-colonial and indigenous bodies, and Western military-strategic ‘mobility’ and involvement in Africa (historic and contemporary). · Thursday 21 March In connection with the previous discussion, the eighth session will be devoted to an exploration of Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie (2015), focusing on the mother-daughter relationship from feminist and film studies perspectives. - Thursday 28 March The ninth session is dedicated to Cypriot poet and writer Stephanos Stephanides’s memoir fiction and critical writing. Stephanides’s subversive reading of home as ‘radical rupture’ is crucial for the acknowledgement of the need for home and the necessity of being warned about its ‘elusive transience’ and ‘fugacity’ and, perhaps, danger. - Thursday 4 April The tenth session examines contemporary Egyptian prose poetry in the 1990s, through the writings of Yasser Abdellatif, Hoda Hussein, Iman Mersal, and Ahmed Yamani. Nearly thirty years later, most of them have travelled across continents, generic boundaries, media regimes, and political events. Is home the last illusion they have had to forsake in their crossings? Explore transcultural connections and divides across Europe, the Mediterranean, Africa and the American continent from the 20th to the 21st century

Application Deadline

Virtual Part starting date 2023-01-26

Virtual Part closing date 2023-04-06

Total student workload 160

Specific field of studies Literary studies, Cultural and Visual Studies, Anglophone literature, Comparative Literature, Modern Languages, Art History, Semiotics

Pre-requisite for selection CV Motivation Letter Level of English (According to CEFR) Research Project Outline

Academic pre-requisites for applicants Master’s and PhD students with qualification or current research in related fields are welcome to apply e.g. literature, cultural and visual studies, modern languages, art history, philosophy, film and media. A C1 proficiency in English is a requisite.

Physical Part starting date 2023-04-24

Physical Part Description The on-site part which will take place at the Athens University History Museum and will be running in five consecutive days, from Monday 24 April to Friday 28 April 2023. On-site sessions will foster collaborative production and rethink cultural practice in relation to social challenges. Students and teachers will ponder together how the blend of practice and research may lead to cultural transformation. Each day will comprise three 2hour long sessions: · two-hour seminar sessions with student presentations based on work related to themes that were introduced in the online sessions led by the teaching staff · two-hour collaborative workshops where students present their own findings and projects · two-hour tutoring sessions alternating with sessions with cultural practitioners focusing on the practitioner’s work

Physical Part closing date 2023-04-28

Language level required C1

Field of studies related to the course Social Science and Humanities Art Design and Media

Course location Online and on-site at the Athens University History Museum of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

Course language English